Say a Prayer for the Octopus

Wednesday, November 5, 2014

Perhaps
now is the moment for the Australian horror film. Just as the late 90’s and early ‘00’s saw an
international fad for Japanese horror (and a series of disappointing American
remakes) and the mid-00’s brought us impressive entries from the Spanish horror
scene (and, again, a series of disappointing American remakes), the late ‘00s
and early ‘10’s (or whatever we’re calling this decade) have presented us with
a number of excellent Australian horror films.
In fact, some of the best horror movies I’ve seen in recent years have
been Australian; I am thinking specifically of Lake Mungo (2008) and The
Tunnel (2011). And it will be much
harder to justify making shitty American remakes of these movies, given that
they’re already in English.

So,
it was with some degree of excitement that I sat down to watch Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook (2014), which generated
huge buzz at Sundance way back in January and then, thanks to the vagaries of
the film distribution business, didn’t become available to us out in the
provinces until much more recently. The Babadook follows the tribulations of
an Australian widow and her six-year-old child as they become subject to the
persecutions of the titular Babadook. The
Babadook is a figure in a children’s book that the child, Samuel, discovers on
his shelf (his mother never bought it for him, its origins are a mystery) and which
he insists on having his mother read to him as a bedtime story. It goes something like this: “If it’s in a
word, or it’s in a look, / You can’t get rid of the Babadook.” And the Babadook
is this black glowering monster with claws who can be seen hovering over the
bed of a poor child not unlike Samuel.
Samuel is traumatized by the book (understandably) and becomes convinced
that the Babadook is haunting him and his mother, and things go downhill from
there.

He looks friendly.

And
the Babadoook couldn’t have arrived on the scene at a worse time, become the
mother, Amelia, is stressed at her nursing home job, her son has a bunch of
behavioral problems, and she still hasn’t gotten over the death of her husband. And this is where my problem with the movie
begins, because this is a type of horror movie that I’ve become all too
familiar with over the years; it is horror predicated upon irritation and
frustration. I would say that a good
bulk of the film is devoted to distinctly prosaic problems in the lives of
Amelia and Samuel, which build upon each other with nightmarish relentlessness:
Samuel doesn’t know how to socialize with other children, he assaults and terrorizes
his cousin, he embarrasses Amelia in front of the neighbors, her boss thinks
poorly of her, she gets in a minor car accident and the guy in the other car is
a dick to her, etc, etc. What I’m
looking for in horror is something Lovecraftian, and I cannot think of any
episode in Lovecraft where the protagonist gets his car towed because he was
parked in a pick-up/drop-off only section outside the Miskatonic University
library, where he was perusing the Necronomicon.

The
horror presented in The Babadook is
the kind of horror that appeals to people who don’t actually like horror
movies. “Oh look, a horror movie without gore or jump-scares,” they say, “how
nice.” And yes, that’s all well and good, but even without those things you can
still have cosmic horror, not profoundly mundane frustrations and vexations. I suspect the critics also feel that this
film is “deeper” than genuinely frightening horror films because it’s invested
so much in the emotional lives of its characters, at the expense of everything
else. As if this was a family drama. Different genres do different things. Horror films are supposed to horrify; if they
can also explore a troubled mother-child relationship, fine, but they mustn’t
do that exclusively.

The Babadook is
especially disappointing because it had the potential to be so much
better. The titular monster, when we get
to engage with him, is scary as fuck (the design of the children’s book where
he makes his first appearance is probably the highlight of the movie). But it seems like every time the film is
about to get intense, it switches gears and brings us a scene of Samuel
persecuting his poor mother by mocking an elderly neighbor’s Parkinson’s
disease to her face or pushing his little cousin out of a tree house and
breaking her nose. And that’s not
horrifying, it’s just annoying.

Wednesday, October 29, 2014

In
1975, Margarethe von Trotta and Volker Schlöndorff released their adaption of
Heinrich Böll’s short novel The Lost Honor
of Katharina Blum, which tells the story of a young woman who is libeled and
destroyed by a media lynch mob. Several
decades later, von Trotta has made an informal sequel in the form of Hannah Arendt (2012). The film follows the titular German-American philosopher
in her coverage of the Adolf Eichmann trial for The New Yorker and its rancorous aftermath. So, first order of business, some background
on the subject.

Adolf
Eichmann was a high-ranking member of the SS who played a crucial role in
facilitating the logistics of the Holocaust.
It was Eichmann who organized the deportations of Jews and Roma from
Nazi-occupied and allied countries to the death camps in the East. When the war ended, he successfully evaded
capture and fled to Argentina, where he lived until 1960, when agents of the
Israeli intelligence organization, the Mossad, kidnapped him and brought him to
Israel to stand trial for his crimes.
Now, this is where Hannah Arendt enters the picture. Arendt was a German Jewish philosopher who
had fled Nazi Germany, first to France, where she was interned at the Gurs
detention camp, then to the United States before the implementation of the “Final
Solution.” In 1960, she travelled to
Israel at the behest of The New Yorker,
hoping to gain an understanding of the monstrous evil she expected to find in
Eichmann. As the trial progressed,
however, it became increasingly clear to Arendt that Eichmann was not a “monster,”
at least not in the conventional sense.
He was, in fact, profoundly normal and not particularly intelligent; he
was capable of speaking only in clichés, which for him served as a substitute
for actual thought. He was a bureaucrat
and saw himself first and foremost as a member of an organization—in which he
sought to achieve advancement for the sake of his personal prestige—and he was
doing what he was told. From this,
Arendt articulated her famous concept of “the banality of evil,” which has
unfortunately become something of a cliché in its own right. Arendt found Eichmann’s normality to be in
its own way quite horrifying, as it suggested that there were plenty of other
seemingly normal bureaucrats out there who would be capable of the same kind of
catastrophic evil.

Von
Trotta’s film begins with an introduction to Arendt’s intellectual life in New
York—a busy social calendar taken up by writers like Mary McCarthy, her
colleagues at the New School, where she taught, and fellow German-Jewish émigrés. It then takes us through Eichmann’s trial and
hits the key points in the book that resulted from it, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. This first half or so of the film plays very
much like respectful biopic, anchored by an engaging performance from Barbara
Sukowa as Arendt (in fact, all the German actors are fine; by contrast, the
American actors in this film are almost without exception terrible). It is in the second half of the film that the
action becomes much more compelling.
Arendt’s report on the trial is serialized in The New Yorker and it unleashes a torrent of hatred and
misrepresentation.

Allow
me to elaborate. One of the most
disturbing elements discussed in Eichmann
in Jerusalem is the role played by Jewish leaders in the Holocaust. According to Arendt, when Eichmann and his
associates brought the “Final Solution” to a country, one of their first
actions was to establish Jewish Councils of Elders (judenräte), Jewish leaders who could serve as intermediaries
between the Nazis and the Jewish people.
They used these councils to facilitate the acquisition (read: theft) of
Jewish property, the concentration of Jews into ghettoes and camps, and finally
the deportation of Jews to death camps in the East. In many cases, the last Jews to be deported
in a territory would be the members of the councils themselves, although they
too were usually sent to their deaths.
Now, as one can imagine, this business of Jewish leaders being made to
be complicit in the destruction of their own people was not palatable to most
Jews in 1960 (or to many non-Jews, for that matter).

Well,
palatable or not, the existence of these Jewish councils is a well-attested
historical fact, they are in the major historiographical works on the
Holocaust, and they came up repeatedly in the Eichmann trial, and Arendt duly
included them in her report on Eichmann.
And a firestorm erupted. People,
many of whom hadn’t actually read her New
Yorker articles or the book released shortly thereafter, accused her of “blaming
the victim” and asserting that the Jews shared responsibility for the
Holocaust. On top of this, her
insistence that Eichmann was not a monster was viewed by many—again, this
included a number of people who hadn’t actually read the articles—as being a defense of Eichmann. And von Trotta’s film depicts these attacks
on Arendt in a profoundly disturbing fashion.
We see her inundated with hate mail, her colleagues insulting her to her
face, close friends breaking ties with her, Israeli agents threatening her. Just as in The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, we see a self-righteous mob fired
by the conviction that it has the right to destroy a person based on rumors and
slander. One is reminded of the Rushdie
case, in which crowds of people turned on a writer because of their outrage
over a book they hadn’t read.

Arendt
is repeatedly accused of coldness and arrogance for refusing to allow her emotions
to cloud her judgment of Eichmann. As for
the matter of the Jewish Councils, nobody tries to contest their existence; they
just wish Arendt had had the good taste and respect to gloss over them. To see the veneer of civility drop away as it
does in the attacks on Arendt is deeply unsettling. In the end, she has little consolation other
than the knowledge that she faced the truth and didn’t shy away from it. Perhaps that is the responsibility of the
philosopher. But it is a lonely
consolation.

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

On
the eighteenth of May, 1936, a prostitute named Sada Abe asphyxiated her lover
to death in a Shibuya inn, then cut off his genitals, which she put in her
purse and carried around with her for several days until her arrest. When the details of the murder came to light,
she became a folk hero in Japan. Wherefore
the murder and castration? And why did the public respond so favorably to it,
if we can phrase it like that?

Sada
Abe had been in the midst of an intense affair with married restaurateur
Kichizo Ishida. They became consumed
with each other and increasingly sought to shut out the outside world. And there was a lot happening in the outside
world at the time. Just three months
earlier, ultra-nationalist army officers had staged a failed uprising in
central Tokyo: this is the so-called February 26th incident. The subsequent crackdown from the
establishment led to an entrenchment of military rule and an expansion of the
pervasive militarism that had come to the fore in Japanese cultural and
political life. The Japanese army was
deeply enmeshed in Manchuria and was poised to invade the rest of China in the
following year. Rather than give
themselves up to the prevailing patriotic fervor of the time, Abe and Ishida
withdrew into their own world of increasingly frenzied sexual pleasures. Theirs was an arguably virtuous selfishness;
I would much rather see two people fuck each other to death by mutual consent
than kill others through selfless, patriotic violence.

Abe
and Ishida eventually got into erotic asphyxiation—which never ends well—and
one day Ishida gave her his tacit consent to kill him (in the movies about Sada
Abe—which we’ll get to in a moment—it’s presented as something like, “I know
you’re going to strangle me in my sleep, so if you do, don’t stop halfway.”)
And so, abiding by what she thought were his wishes, she strangled him to
death.

Now,
there have been several films made about the “Sada Abe incident,” the most
famous of which is Nagisa Oshima’s super-explicit 1975 masterpiece In the Realm of the Senses. As the Japanese censors ban the depiction of
human genitalia in movies, Oshima was forced to edit the film—which is as
graphic as the most hardcore pornography—in France, and an unexpurgated version
of the film has never been released in Japan.
Oshima, a committed member of the far left and a champion of those on
the margins of Japanese society—criminals, prostitutes, Koreans, non-conformists—saw
Abe’s passionate romance and its violent denouement as a revolutionary
rejection of Japanese imperial culture.
He recognized the potential for political subversion in transgressive
sex.

Pretty much the only SFW still-frame to be found from In the Realm of the Senses.

As
a result of these serious political considerations, Oshima’s movie—profoundly
erotic and beautiful thought if may be—has, it could be argued, a certain humorlessness
about it. Maybe that’s putting it too
harshly, but it’s hard to come to a different conclusion when we place In the Realm of the Senses in contrast
with Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 1998 film Sada. While Oshima’s films are frequently animated
by a consistent political agenda, Obayashi’s—from what I’ve seen of them, and I’ve
only seen a few, as most are woefully unavailable in the U.S.—are psychedelic
mindfucks. And while both filmmakers
engaged in formal experimentation, Oshima’s was always tempered by the need to
convey his aforementioned political commitments; Obayashi, by contrast, in
films like Emotion (1966), House (1977), and Sada, gleefully upends filmic conventions for the sheer pleasure of
doing so. And so his Sada Abe story
switches at random between black-and-white and color and features bleeding
cartoon hearts and slap-sticky fast-motion sequences. He sees in Sada Abe’s wildly unconventional
life an opportunity for play and in the process creates a distinctly warmer,
more humane Sada than Oshima’s more erratic, at times hysterical protagonist. And again, I don’t mean any of this to
disparage In the Realm of the Senses;
but I think Sadaphiles (Sadists?) would find a fuller treatment of the folk
hero if they watched Oshima’s film side-by-side with Obayashi’s.

For
instance, the latter’s Sada has an especial fondness for mini-doughnuts which
she often has on hand throughout the film; there’s a delightful scene where
Ishida, bearing a strategically concealed erection—must pacify the censors—suggests
that they play “ring-toss” with the doughnuts.
It’s not the sort of thing one would encounter in Oshima’s film, but even
though it’s far less graphic than anything you’d find in In the Realm of the Senses, it presents a more earthy and
true-to-life take on sex that is in its way just as vivid.

Friday, October 17, 2014

French
director Abel Gance was perhaps the first European filmmaker to create movies
on the epic scale achieved by D. W. Griffith in films like The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916). The
Americans had the advantage over their European counterparts in that their
country had not been devastated by the First World War, which had consumed
Europe just as epic cinema was coming into existence. It is perhaps not surprising then that the
first European film to employ this similarly epic approach, Gance’s J’accuse (1919), took WWI as its theme. J’accuse
tells two stories, really: the first, a melodramatic love triangle involving
two men and their love for the same woman; the second, a harrowing and
remarkably realistic depiction of the experiences of those two men fighting on
the Western front. J’accuse pioneered the use of location shooting: much of its war
scenes were filmed directly on the recently vacated battlefields of WWI and, in
some cases, while the war was still in
progress, thusly blurring the line between fiction and documentary.

Now,
there are several aspects of this film that I’d like to touch on. First, J’accuse
grapples with an issue that would confront David Lean decades later during the
production of Dr. Zhivago: how does
one depict a poet on the screen? How do we “show” poetry? Is it enough to just
have the poet read his or her poetry, or is there some aspect of filmic
language that can present a poetic worldview?
The hero of J’accuse, the virtuous
Jean Diaz, is a poet, and Gance’s treatment of his poetry is quite
beautiful. Near the beginning of the
film, Jean recites a poem called “Ode to the Sun,” and rather than presenting
the words in the intertitles, Gance presents us with a series of beautiful
images of the sun, reflecting in calm oceanic water, rippling across a rushing
stream, and warming a grassy field. Jean’s
words are thusly alchemically transmuted into pure imagery.

Later
in the film, when Jean’s soul has been destroyed by war, he returns to his “Ode
to the Sun” and rereads it, and this time Gance accompanies the tranquil images
of happier times with the actual words of the poem onscreen. And it serves as a devastating contrast to
the realities that Jean has confronted in battle; as far as Jean is concerned
now, the words of the poem, and the beautiful images that they create, are
lies. As one of the intertitles tells
us, the “soldier in him destroyed the poet.”

Shifting
our focus a bit here, I want to discuss the climax of the film, which is as
memorable as anything you’ll ever see in cinema. A deranged Jean, having returned to his
hometown in Provence, becomes obsessed with the idea that the survivors must
render an account of their conduct to the war dead. This is part of where the title, J’accuse—“I accuse”—comes into
play. Jean accuses the survivors, be
they civilians or fellow soldiers. In
fact, he accuses all of France, and the entire world order, for the irrevocable
slaughter that has been perpetrated.
Now, the phrase “j’accuse” would have deep associations in France; it is
the title of the polemic with which Emile Zola reopened the Dreyfus Affair
which tore apart French society in the late 1890’s and early 1900’s. J’accuse is the refrain of the just, venting
their spleen on all the corruption and malignity hidden beneath the façade of
polite society.

So
Jean levels his “j’accuse” at the survivors and summons up the dead as his
witnesses. And, casting all pretense of
realism aside, the dead awaken. We see a field of wooden crosses scattered
across a battlefield fade from view, supplanted by the bodies they rest upon. And the bodies rise up, a veritable army of
the dead, and flood into town to confront the living. One is reminded of the climactic scene in
Koji Wakamatsu’s United Red Army,
where the militants, faced with surrender or fighting to the death, consider
the latter option because they have to somehow justify themselves to their
comrades whom they’ve murdered or driven to suicide. Europe found itself facing the same conundrum
after WWI. How could they justify
themselves to the millions of young men they’d sacrificed to Moloch? I don’t have an answer, and I don’t think
Gance really did either as, in his film, the dead are quickly contented by the
sight of their loved ones and return to their graves, while the living are left
to ponder whether what has just passed is a dream or a hallucination.

This
image of the war dead as a surging crowd is best conjured up by T. S. Eliot in
one of the most memorable passages of The
Waste Land: “Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, / A crowd flowed over
London bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many.” In the
event of a zombie apocalypse, perhaps the risk is not that they’ll eat out
brains; perhaps the real risk is that they’ll judge us.

Saturday, October 11, 2014

Every
year I get excited about the Nobel Prize for Literature and every year they
disappoint me. More often than not, they
give it to a bland, humorless European like J. M. G. Le Clézio or Herta Muller
or, as they did this year, Patrick Modiano.
If you look at the history of the award, you’ll find that all sorts of
politics and prejudices inform the Nobel Committee’s selections and they often
have nothing to do with literary merit.
As a result, people like Vladimir Nabakov and Jorge Luis Borges never
won the prize, but Mikhail Sholokhov and Elfreide Jelenik did. In fact, they’ve given the award to so many
undeserving people that it should have lost all meaning by now, but it
hasn’t. Not for me, anyway. I would still like to see my favorite writers
win it. With that in mind, I present to
you a list of four writers who deserve the Nobel Prize far more than Patrick
Modiano, followed by an explanation of why they won’t win it. Let us commence.

Name:
Haruki Murakami.
Known for: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,
Kafka on the Shore, 1Q84.
Why he should win: Murakami is one of
the most consistently engaging and enchanting writers at work today. He has a deep and penetrating understanding of
modernity and the loneliness and alienation that it inflicts on people. That said, he leavens his vision with a sense
of the surreal and the playful (think of the sheep man in A Wild Sheep Chase) as well as a pervasive feeling of compassion.
Why he won’t win: The Nobel people, consummate hipsters, pride themselves on
picking obscure authors. Murakami is an
international best-seller. He’s far too
famous and successful to win the Nobel Prize.
On top of that, he’s Asian, and the persistently Eurocentric prize, since
its inception in 1901, has only been awarded to four East Asian writers,
including Mo Yan in 2012. With such a
recent Asian selection, I suspect the Nobel Committee will wait at least ten
years before settling on another Asian writer.

Name:
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o.
Known for: Weep Not, Child, The Devil on the Cross, The Wizard of the Crow.
Why he should win: The Kenyan novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o is a towering figure
in African literature, arguably the greatest living African novelist (since the
death of Chinua Achebe, who inexplicably never won the Nobel Prize). In a career spanning over fifty years, Ngũgĩ’s
novels and plays have explored themes of anti-colonial resistance,
post-coloniality, and African identity.
Originally writing in English, Ngũgĩ switched over to his first
language, Gikuyu, believing that Africans should refrain from writing in
colonial languages in order to cultivate a more authentically African
literature (this is an idea that I don’t agree with, but it’s been very
influential). His 2006 novel The Wizard of the Crow is the longest
novel ever to be written in a sub-Saharan African language.
Why he won’t win: He’s African. In the
entire history of the Nobel Prize for Literature, only a single sub-Saharan
African has won it (Wole Soyinka in 1986).
The Nobel Committee seems to think that European subjects are universal subjects,
while African and Asian subjects are merely of regional interest.

Name:
Cees Nooteboom.
Known for: In the Dutch Mountains, The Following Story, Lost Paradise.
Why he should win: Remarkably, despite its rich literary history, the
Netherlands has never won a single Nobel Prize for literature. This could be due in part to the lack of
translation into English of Dutch writers; in order to win a Nobel, your work
has to have appeared in a language understood by the people on the committee—primarily
English, French, and Swedish—and , at least on the English front, the Dutch
seem to have been neglected. Nooteboom,
many of whose books have been translated into English but are now hard to find
in the U.S., would be a wonderful choice for the prize. His erudite, playful, and profoundly
civilized books constitute one of the richest oeuvres in post-war European
literature. Furthermore, if he won the Prize,
it would bring them back into print and into bookstores in the U.S. and, who
knows, maybe even spur the translation of other Dutch writers.
Why he won’t win: He has a sense of humor, something the Nobel people tend to
frown on. Their recent choices have
been, with a few exceptions, remarkably humorless, and in this respect
Nooteboom would hardly fit in with people like J. M. Coetzee and Tomas
Tranströmer.

Name:
Yoko Tawada.
Known for: The Bridegroom was a Dog, Where Europe Begins, The Naked Eye
Why she should win: Tawada began her career in Japan but subsequently immigrated
to Germany and she writes in both Japanese and German. She is the consummate literary cosmopolitan,
and this is reflected in her elegant little books, which explore the borders of
national, linguistic, and other identities in the modern world. In writing her novel The Naked Eye, she wrote some portions in German and some in
Japanese, then translated the German sections into Japanese and the Japanese
sections into German, so that she ended up with two distinct but equally “authentic”
final texts.
Why she won’t win: Oh God, she has so much stacked against her. First off, like Nooteboom, she has a sense of
humor. But more damning is her race and
her sex. In addition to their Eurocentrism,
the Nobel people are sexist and rarely give the prize to women, although they’ve
been improving in this are in recent years.
But this combination of factors makes it unlikely that Tawada would ever
be seriously considered.

Post-script:
Sully Prudhomme is a French poet whose sole claim to fame is that he won the
first Nobel Prize for Literature in 1901.
He has since become emblematic o f the Nobel Committee’s tendency to give
the award to people whose work doesn’t stand the test of time and who
subsequently fall into obscurity once the buzz surrounding their Nobel has
faded.

Sunday, October 5, 2014

The
vast majority of uprisings throughout history have gone down to ignominious
defeat. From the revolt of Oshio
Heihachiro against the Tokugawa regime in 1837 to the Japanese student protests
of the late 1960’s, this has been true of modern Japanese history (I say “the
vast majority,” not “all,” mind you; the Meiji revolt was certainly successful).
But in many cases it’s the gesture of
revolt that counts more than its efficacy.
This is the argument advanced in Ivan Morris’s book The Nobility of Failure: Tragic Heroes in the History of Japan. He wrote it in the wake of his friend Yukio
Mishima’s quixotic “coup attempt” and subsequent ritual suicide in 1970. This same year saw the release of Masahiro
Shinoda’s carnivalesque study of the futility of revolution, The Scandalous Adventures of Buraikan.

Masahiro
Shinoda rose to fame with the Japanese New Wave in the early 1960’s and his
prolific and varied output included noir, domestic dramas, rebellious youth
movies, and period pieces (jidaegeki),
including Assassination (1964) and Samurai Spy (1965), which have to be
some of the most convoluted samurai movies ever made. But by the time 1970 rolled around, the
Japanese movie landscape was beginning to change dramatically, with the old
studios going bankrupt (Daiei) or shifting to increasingly pornographic fare (Nikkatsu). A lot of the other Japanese New Wavers were
either turning to documentary (like Oshima and Imamura) or drifting out of the
industry (like poor Seijun Suzuki, who was fired by Nikkatsu in 1967 and
subsequently blacklisted for the next ten years). Shinoda was one of the few filmmakers of his
generation to keep up a more or less uninterrupted output of increasingly
strange films through the 1970’s, which saw him eventually turning to an
exploration of folk and mythological subjects in bizarre films like Himiko (1974) and Under the Blossoming Cherry Trees (1975).

So
The Scandalous Adventures of Buraikan
comes at what is in many respects a transitional period for Shinoda; the same
can be said of Japanese cinema and Japanese society, where the radical left was
more or less defeated and a capitalist consensus settled into place. Buraikan
reflects many of these tensions and transformations. The film is set in decadent late-Edo Japan,
where Mizuno, a high-ranking administrator with a moralistic streak, has set
out to reform society through a series of puritanical laws banning: prostitution,
fireworks, most forms of theater, flamboyant dress, etc. The various entertainers and denizens of the
pleasure quarters find themselves out of a job and, as one of them puts it, “What’s
the point of being alive if we can’t do what we want?” A revolutionary
atmosphere begins to obtain in Edo (as Tokyo was called at them time) and it
draws together a ragtag group of unlikely insurgents (as tends to be the case
under these circumstances): Naojiro (Tatsuya Nakadai), a would-be actor with a
meddlesome mother who keeps coming between him and the prostitute he loves;
Kaneko, an assassin/psychopathic killing machine who wishes to murder all those
in power; Ushimatsu, a poor painter whose wife has killed herself and whose son
has been sold to an itinerant acting troop; and Kochiyama, a high-ranking
government official who wishes to harness the power of the discontented masses
to unseat Mizuno and restore theaters and prostitution to the people of Japan.

Of
these diverse figures, Naijiro seems the most emblematic of the hedonistic
spirit of the Yoshiwara pleasure quarters.
Largely apolitical, he joins the conspiracies of the revolutionaries for
fun and because it gives him a larger stage than he can secure for himself in the
theatrical world (where there seems to be no place for him; he’s not a
professional actor, he’s a dilettante). In
his domestic life, his sole concern is his own pleasure, and so he abuses his
mother when she harasses him about his conduct.
When his frustration with her reaches the breaking point, he literally
picks her up and hurls her off a cliff into the Sumida river (she gets rescued
and comes back to bicker with him some more).
As the movie reaches its climax, Naijiro has left his revolutionary
friends to spend time with his prostitute lover and as the insurgents are
slaughtered, he picks up his mother to throw her off a cliff again. Because these things are cyclical, and the
rising up and rising down (as William T. Vollmann would phrase it) of popular
violence is just as inevitable as the changing of the seasons or Naijiro
attempting to kill his mother. In the
background, the local coffin-maker continues to hammer away at a product always
in demand.

Post-script:
As far as I can tell, nobody in this movie is named Buraikan. So I have no idea where the title comes from
or what it’s supposed to mean.

Monday, September 29, 2014

As
a person who enjoys classifying people and things, I am always happy to place
filmmakers within specific categories and movements. In the Japanese context, there are the Golden
Age directors (stretching from the thirties through the late fifties/early
sixties): these are filmmakers like Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu, and Kenji
Mizoguchi. Then there are the members of
the Japanese New Wave (the Nuberu Bagu) of the early sixties: Nagisa Oshima,
Shohei Imamura, Yoshishige Yoshida. But
there are certain filmmakers who fall somewhere in between these neat
categorizations: filmmakers like Masaki Kobayashi and the subject of today’s
post, Kon Ichikawa. Too late on the
scene to belong fully to the Golden Age (in my more or less arbitrary
definition, a Golden Ager has to have begun making films before or at least
during WWII) but maintaining too much of the technique and the aesthetic of the
Golden Age to qualify as New Wave, Ichikawa and the filmmakers of his
generation occupy a transitional period in Japanese cinema.

Ichikawa,
like many Japanese filmmakers, is unfortunately only spottily represented on
DVD in the United States. Criterion has
released two of his WWII films, The
Burmese Harp and Fires on the Plain
(more on these presently), Tokyo Olympiad,
a well-regarded documentary about the 1964 Tokyo Olympics which now appears to
be out of print, and The Makioka Sisters,
an adaptation of the Tanizaki novel of the same name. Criterion has also made available on Hulu Odd Obsession—another Tanizaki
adaptation, this time of his late novel The
Key, which hints at the more explicit sexual concerns of the New Wave—It Isn’t Easy Being Two, a film about
early childhood, and Princess from the
Moon, which, as far as I can tell, narrates a Close Encounters-style version of the classic Japanese tale of “The
Bamboo Cutter’s Daughter.” I haven’t seen these last two because they don’t
appeal to me, I haven’t seen The Makioka
Sisters because I want to read the novel first, and I haven’t seen Tokyo Olympiad because I can’t find it. This means that my entire experience of
Ichikawa’s cinema is confined to The
Burmese Harp, Odd Obsession, and Fires on the Plain.

In
his prime—the late fifties and early sixties—Ichikawa’s films were all scripted
by his wife, Natto Wada, who became disillusioned with Japanese cinema in 1965
and retired, allegedly triggering a marked decline in the quality of Ichikawa’s
films. However, in 1956, when The Burmese Harp was released, the
Ichikawa-Wada partnership was still going strong and the result is one of the most
enigmatic war movies you’re ever likely to see.
Set in Burma at the end of WWII, the film depicts a close-knit Japanese
army unit as they surrender to British forces.
The unit’s captain is a musician and he’s turned his force into a choir
and they frequently raise morale by joining together in song, all to the
accompaniment of the titular Burmese harp, played by a soldier named Mizushima. For reference purposes, a Burmese harp looks
like this:

Upon
discovering that Japan has surrendered, Mizushima’s unit promptly surrenders as
well. However, there is another Japanese
army unit nearby holed up in the mountains and intent on fighting to the
death. The British send Mizushima, armed
only with his harp, to try to negotiate the surrender of the hold-outs, while
the rest of his unit is sent down south to an internment camp. Now, one of the striking things about this
movie is how little we really know about our Japanese protagonists. We have no idea what their experience of the
war has been like prior to the opening of the film. How long have they been in Burma? Have they been in other theaters? What
horrible things have they seen? What
horrible things have the y done? This all remains a mystery. But what happens next to Mizushima, regardless
of whatever came before, is a psychic catastrophe. Because Mizushima fails to convince the
Japanese hold-outs to surrender, and they are promptly massacred by the British,
their bodies left to rot. Mizushima,
injured but alive, is discovered by a Burmese monk, who nurses him back to
health; Mizushima repays him by stealing his robes. He shaves his head and wanders the land as a
mendicant monk. His initial intention is
just to head south to rejoin his unit in captivity, but as he travels, he is
repeatedly confronted by the unburied, decomposing bodies of Japanese soldiers,
and they exert a strange spell on him, and he finds himself unable to rejoin
his comrades.

Now,
the exact nature of Mizushima’s problem is left unclear for most of the movie. But he seems to have been cast in the role of
an everyman confronted with the violence of historical forces beyond his
control. And, one drop of water in a sea
of human suffering though he may be, he takes it upon himself to try to restore
peace to the world, or at least to the little patch of Burma where he finds
himself. One is reminded of the naïve/idiot
character played by Jim Caviezel in Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line who, in an unlikely poetic outburst, asks, “What
is this war within nature? Why must the land contend with the sea? [etc., etc.,
typical Malick pseudo-philosphy.]” But Mizushima is asking the same questions
and Ichikawa’s film is similar to Malick’s in that it places its human drama
within a broader landscape of great natural beauty (although they’re both
tropical, Burma possesses an austerity lacking in the unimpeded fecundity of
Guadalcanal).

The Burmese Harp
climaxes with Mizushima asking why such suffering has to exist in the world and
concluding that it is not for humans to know the answers to such questions, but
merely to do their best to alleviate that suffering. And this is where they lose me. Because the suffering experienced by millions
upon millions of people in the Second World War was not inexplicable; it was
the product of concrete, readily understandable historical processes; first and
foremost—in the Asia-Pacific theater—the rise of Japanese militarism and
imperialism. To ascribe the war to unknowable
mystical forces is a cop-out and it undermines the deeply felt humaneness that
animates much of Ichikawa’s film. There is
great compassion and even optimism on display here, in marked contrast to Fires on the Plain (1959), an
unrelenting nightmare about the few survivors of a Japanese army unit trying
hopelessly to evacuate from a Filipino island while being picked off by unseen
American forces and ravaged by starvation.
In The Burmese Harp, Mizushima’s
comrades want to survive the war in part so that they can return home and
rebuild Japan. In Fires on the Plain, nobody is thinking that far ahead. There will be no recourse to mysticism in
this film, nor will there we be any trace of hope. Perhaps, if one were to sit down to watch the
two movies, it would be good to watch The
Burmese Harp last, so that one might retain greater hope for humanity.